[Docere]

AFAIK Bensonhurst and environs it really wasn't a major Italian area until the 1950s and 1960s, when it saw an influx of postwar immigration. The Federal Writers Project report on the city's Italians, written in 1938, didn't mention Bensonhurst among the city's major Italian areas. Glazer and Moynihan's Beyond the Melting Pot, written in the early 1960s, neglected to mention it when the discussed the city's Italian neighborhoods even as this immigration was underway.

I think it was mainly Jewish in the 1930s and 1940s - some famous Jews from Bensonhurst include Larry King, Carl Sagan and Sandy Koufax.